Sunday, 26 January 2014

This image is often used on forums to represent Satoshi Nakamoto; it stems from the image of the "most typical person."

For all of Bitcoin’s fabled transparency—its open source development, how the block chain is totally public, and the fact that we know exactly how many coins will be minted ever—one mystery remains, perhaps forever. Who the hell is Satoshi Nakamoto?

By now, we’ve all heard some version of the nebulous theories: if he’s a man or a woman; British or American; a single person or a group; a private enterprise or a government conspiracy. Fantasizing about that stuff is fun because it’s stranger than fiction, but it gets us no closer to understanding who he is or what his vision was for his Frankenstein currency. But what we cando is analyze what he said, which was plenty. Admittedly, there's no way we can concretely prove any of these quotes actually came from Satoshi beyond the fact they use the same username, though few people consider the possibility of an imposter in these early days of Bitcoin's birth.

November 1, 2008 (The Cryptography Mailing List): "I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party."

This was the introduction to Satoshi's now infamous white paper unleashing the concept of Bitcoin to the world. As always, he was matter-of-fact and unassuming, providing his baby free of any embellishment.

November 7, 2008 (The Cryptography Mailing List): "Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled network like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own."

While Satoshi did his best to maintain an apolitical stance, his comments on finding a technological solution when the political system was found to be lacking belied his techno-libertarian sensibilities and hacker mindset. Yifu Guo—long time Bitcoin insider and creator of the first specially designed systems for mining—mirrored such sentiments when he told us in our interview with him last year that their original motto was “ask for forgiveness, not for permission.” Bitcoin early adopters and technocentric social-transcendents alike refuse to be shackled by society’s pesky rules.

"[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly," Satoshi admitted. "I’m better with code than with words though."

Satoshi clearly zeroed in on the power of peer-to-peer technology and the ability to connect outside the constructs of historically calcified systems. The history of music piracy is technological Darwinism at its finest. Technological fitness evolved as each new iteration was eliminated by government antibiotics, each mutation proving ever more difficult to address.

Today, regulatory subscriptions are totally ineffective against the illegal exchange of copyrighted data. When the authorities are forced to raid the home of Kim Dotcom’s mom, you know they’ve conceivably exhausted all other options. We live in the era of “superbugs” in terms of digital innovation. The powers that be will never be able to completely stamp out torrenting just as cryptocurrencies will always exist.

January 3, 2009 (The Genesis Block): "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

This was the famous comment left in the very first Bitcoin transaction, an actual news headline from the front page of the Times in London on that day, which sheds light on Satoshi’s fundamental motivation: people feel let down by our global financial industry. Worse, when shit hits the fan, the government will always bail out too-big-to-fail banks at the expense of everyone else.

Embedded within this straightforward, factual news headline is a deep sense of systematic injustice. Keeping the ship afloat is an admirable cause, but doing so in a way that relinquished the architects of the greatest economic disaster in generations from financial, regulatory, or criminal consequences felt deeply unfair. Satoshi brought it upon himself to develop a form of technological solution and protest. What a cyberpunk.

Satoshi would later comment on his thought process, confirming again his notorious caution and inherent awareness of PR game theory. “I very much wanted to find some way to include a short message, but the problem is, the whole world would be able to see the message,” he wrote a year later. “As much as you may keep reminding people that the message is completely non-private, it would be an accident waiting to happen.”

It also hinted that Satoshi might be British. I’ve only heard of chancellors from Star Wars and my college roommate’s World of Warcraft guild, but apparently across the pond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury here in the US.

February 11, 2009 (P2P Foundation): "Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up."

Bitcoin has often been characterized for being deflationary, which arguably destabilizes its value, but this was by design. In particular, Satoshi looked to exploit our human weakness for FOMO.

Likewise, he didn't see the issue of lost coins as a big deal. "Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more," he later wrote. "Think of it as a donation to everyone."

February 14, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forum) “I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large [Bitcoin] transaction volume or no volume.”

Satoshi had a knack for saying stuff that any rational person would have a tough time disagreeing with, like his predictions for Bitcoin’s success. Indeed, one of Bitcoin’s early vocal critics, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget, articulated Satoshi’s thinking in his teardown of the budding cryptocurrency for having “everything it needs to become a major speculative bubble.”

“But the difference between Bitcoin and, say, the 1990s Internet bubble, is that there really is no fundamental way to value Bitcoin,” argued Blodget, predicting that Bitcoin could reach $5,000 or could reach zero.

In fact, Blodget’s suggestion toes Bitcoin’s own ideological party line, one that I’ve heard repeated by other insiders, crypto-entrepreneurs and core developers including lead developer Gavin Andresen—who worked closely with Satoshi in the early days while he was still around. “Don’t invest more in bitcoins than you are willing to lose,” he told us when we spoke to him at the Bitcoin conference in San Jose last year. “The value of bitcoins could reach $10,000 or just as easily go back to zero.”

Far from ambivalence, Satoshi’s statement reflected a deep sense of conviction regarding his baby. If Bitcoin ever caught on, it would be huge, but his manner of communication was soaked in confident humility, preemptively sidestepping inevitable criticism of what could be conceived as an opportunistic fad. No one can predict the future, but by delivering the message in such a way, Satoshi imbued his belief in a potentially game changing bit of innovation while relinquishing believers from financial responsibility. For early adopters after all, it was never about the price.

February 26, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “How does everyone feel about the B symbol with the two lines through the outside? Can we live with that as our logo?”

A true renaissance man in every sense of the word, Satoshi even came up with Bitcoin’s globally recognized logo, most likely without ever setting foot in Parsons School of Design.

June 18, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “[I’ve been working on Bitcoin] since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it. Much more of the work was designing than coding. Fortunately, so far all the issues raised have been things I previously considered and planned for.”

Most great technologists throughout history and especially in the modern era, the Elon Musks and Steve Jobs, are more producers than pure engineers—jacks of all trades with an eye for tomorrow and the wherewithal to put the right pieces together to form an effective end product. Technological advancement is incremental and it’s often the case that true innovation comes from putting together the puzzle pieces, equal parts science and cultural curation. Any groundbreaking inventor stands on the shoulder of giants.

Satoshi is no different. Rather than make narrow breakthroughs in any particular field, he found himself at the intersection of rapidly maturing tech that allowed him to address age-old paradoxes. In the case of Bitcoin, Satoshi’s elegant marriage of cryptography, decentralized peer-to-peer technology, and financial social networking solved the so-called Two Generals’ Problem.

Without getting into the intricacies of the decades-old thought experiment, Bitcoin’s true innovation is that it finally allows consensus without the need for a central authority. Until Bitcoin, any transaction had to be confirmed by a credible entity, in most cases a bank or service like Western Union or Paypal. They confirm that anyone trying to spend money has the necessary funds to their name. By cleverly eliminating this requirement while maintaining trust, Satoshi created a form of currency that could forever live in the elusive gray areas of society and more importantly, the digital world. This simultaneously allows for Bitcoin to behave like cash on the internet while providing the cryptocurrency a fundamental resilience against centralized powers.

"The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure," Satoshi explained. "Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending."

July 5, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “We don’t want to lead with 'anonymous.' I am definitely not making any such taunt or assertion [that] 'The developers expect that this will result in a stable-with-respect-to-energy currency outside the reach of any government.'"

Satoshi wasn’t as punkish or anti-establishment as people might think given the initial narrative of Bitcoin as a vehicle for money-laundering, drug purchases, or in the case of purist libertarians, a means to finally end government power. This was either never his aim or he was thoughtful enough to realize it wasn’t a smart ideological approach.

The evolution of the movement appears to confirm this as governments begin to devise relevant regulations and Bitcoin becomes assimilated into the system. Rather than replace what we know, cryptocurrencies complement what we’ve already built and understand. Satoshi was a lot less inflammatory than he gets credit for.

July 5, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description [of Bitcoin] for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.”

Wrapping your head around Bitcoin can be exhausting, partly because it’s like nothing else in existence—a notion Satoshi was keenly aware of.

July 29, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.”

Smug bastard.

August 7, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.”

Bitcoin mining has been a source of criticism for its environmental impact. Solving arbitrary proofs could be perceived as a waste of energy, but Satoshi attempted to rationalize this by emphasizing the potential benefits of the technology. Without energy-sucking mining, Bitcoin’s self-regulating, decentralized model wouldn’t be possible. As Satoshi probably figured, it’s not like anyone has come up with a better idea, not yet.

August 27, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums)“Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock. [They’re] more like a collectible or commodity.”

Economic experts like to point out that Bitcoin doesn’t resemble a currency at all but acts more like gold. Satoshi agreed that it had the characteristics of a commodity. By comparing it to a collectible, was he entertaining the idea that it might resemble a fad like tulips, Furbies, or pogs?

September 23, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have, either don’t want the spouse to see it on the bill or don’t trust giving their number to “porn guys”, or afraid of recurring billing.”

For Satoshi, the subversive tendencies of anonymity were more about philosophical privacy rather than illicit activities.

December 12, 2010 (BitcoinTalk Forums): “There’s more work to do on DoS, but I’m doing a quick build of what I have so far in case it’s needed, before venturing into more complex ideas.”

This was Satoshi’s final message. He had previously conceded that the “software is not at all resistant to DoS attack,” but had promised to work on the issue. It’s possible that he never figured out a concrete solution and, overviewing the project’s progress, decided that his work was already done. One can only guess what “complex ideas” he was venturing into.

Friday, 24 January 2014

ANON: You wrote the first ground breaking article in the Scientific American on anonymous cash. Can you tell us what you think has happened since that article was published? Do people understand and appreciate the need to protect their identities?

DAVID CHAUM: I think the appreciation of personal privacy and information in context of technology has been growing steadily since the 80’s. A number of people became so worried about it, such that their concerns were saturated and they gave up worrying about it. The article was not just on e-cash, but anonymity and comprehensive privacy solutions.

ANON: Can you explain what you mean by the term “secure election voting”?

DAVID CHAUM: there are four issues involved in secure election voting. The integrity of how votes are counted along with transparency in the counting process is most important. Ballot secrecy allows voting where an individual can vote without being influenced by an other and without being able to convince others of how they voted. The robustness and survivability of the system is also necessary to ensure that it can withstand disruption. Finally, election voting should provides access to the widest range of voters.

It has been tricky for secure e-voting to achieve integrity and secrecy at the same time. Until this work, there hasn’t been a good solution.

ANON: What does secure voting have in common with electronic cash?

DAVID CHAUM: Both are applications of cryptography. These systems are both different from many typical automation systems in that they empower the individual to interact with society in a way that is secured by the individual. They differ substantially in the way that they handle two fundamental properties of information systems: secrecy and authentication. In e-cash, privacy is unconditional and doesn’t depend on the bad guys being unable to break codes. With e-voting, it is the integrity of the system that cannot be compromised; privacy can be violated if the adversary has enough computing power.

ANON: The secure voting systems you write about emphasize receipts. Does that go hand in hand with non-identification?

DAVID CHAUM: Receipts don’t contain the identity of the voter but contain a random identifying number so you can look up your vote on the Web. The voter can check their vote accurately and reflect on their ballot. With provisional voting – when voter is told that the name is not listed on the roster, they can submit the vote, but it may or may not be counted depending on the checking that takes place afterwards – so in that case the voter’s name is associated with the encrypted vote that is printed on the receipt. In both cases, there is privacy for the voter and the vote is anonymous.

ANON: What could online voting do for democracy

DAVID CHAUM: It could enfranchise a larger class of people who can’t attend polling stations. More fundamentally, it reduces the cost and time needed to have an election and could involve more participation by individuals and allow for elections to be held on a more impromptu or as needed basis. There are other differences that haven’t received a lot of attention. For example, the voter in an online setting may have access to all kinds of information such as the voting behaviour of candidates and recommendations of other groups and individuals, etc. So the voter can make a more informed and complex vote.ANON: In your view, what is the connection between democracy and the preservation of anonymous means of interacting?

DAVID CHAUM: Freedom of expression and participation without fear of retribution is the basis for democracy. Anonymity is the only known means to achieve it - that’s why anonymity is essential in voting.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014

What is a co-operative?

Co-operative businesses are owned and run by and for their members, whether they are customers, employees or residents. As well as giving members an equal say and share of the profits, co-operatives act together to build a better world.

Co-operatives are a flexible business model. They can be set up in different ways, using different legal structures, depending on what works for the members.

The definition of a co-operative business is that they are owned and run by the members - the people who benefit from the co-operative's services.

Although they carry out all kinds of business, all co-operative businesses have core things in common.

"I'm one of 3500 members of FC United of Manchester. We own an equal share of the football club that we support, as well as being members of a co-operative. For that, I’m a happy man!"

Phil Frampton, FC United of Manchester.

Co-operatives share their profits

Co-operatives want to trade successfully – they are businesses, not charities, after all.

Members, such as farmers or freelancers, tenants or taxi drivers, can often do better by working together. And sharing the profit is a way to keep it fair and make it worthwhile.

Rather than rewarding outside investors, a co-operative shares its profits amongst the members.

Co-operatives are owned by people like you

Co-operatives are a business model that exists to serve its members, whether they are the customers, the employees, or the local community.

The members are the owners, with an equal say in what the co-operative does.

As well as getting the products and services they need, members help shape the decisions their co-operative makes.

Across the UK, co-operatives are owned by 13.5 million people – and these numbers keep on growing.

Co-operatives are a success around the world

This mix of self-help and mutual aid has made co-operative business an international force for good.

100 million people around the world are employed by co-operatives, whilst nearly 1 billion are members.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

We're pleased to announce that the team from Circle are going to be in London on Tuesday 21st January and they'd like to get to meet the London bitcoin community.

Join us at Club Workspace in Clerkenwell where we'll host an informal evening with presentations from CEO, Jeremy Allaire, and CTO, Sean Neville.

We're also very pleased to announce that core Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, will be joining Jeremy and Sean and will also be taking to the stage. If you're new to bitcoin, be sure to check out some of Mike's previous presentations - fascinating stuff.

This event is weighted towards those of you that are exploring business opportunities in the bitcoin space and will hopefully also provide a platform for you to discuss ideas and connect with investors and business/technical partners.

If you're new to bitcoin and are hoping to learn more about the basics, we'll be holding our next bootcamp at TechHub in February.

Presentations will take up less time on this occasion in order to allow room for an open-mic session where ideas can be pitched and services can be offered.

Many of you will have heard about Circle's well funded launch recently but visit their website if you'd like to know more:

Club Workspace are our venue sponsor for the evening. By registering for this event you will be giving us permission to share your email address with Club Workspace ONLY in order for them to send you more information about their co-working spaces in and around London.

When Scott Heiferman and his co-founder launched Meetup in the wake of 9/11, their mission was to revitalize local communities in America. With these numbers 10 years later, it's safe to say, "mission accomplished."

But Heiferman is still hard at work helping people find "Meetups Everywhere About Most Everything." The platform uses the power of the Internet to get people off the Internet, so they can develop relationships IRL with those who share their passions, from book clubs to entrepreneurship networking to running groups. If you have a passion, there's a Meetup for it.

Heiferman himself starts many days with a Meetup. "It's so important to stay connected to what you're doing," he says.

The rest of his day is spent talking to people, creating a better product, building a better team and interacting with Meetup organizers. He wants to know why people are starting Meetups and joining Meetups and what they're hoping to get out of it. "I'm generally not in front of a computer, I don't have a desk — I just want to be in creative mode," says Heiferman, a serial entrepreneur who founded Fotolog, a photo-sharing network popular in South America, i-traffic, an online ad agency, and the New York Tech Meetup which now has 25,000 members.

Meet up Founder Ted 2011

Meet up founder interview

David Bismark E Voting without Fraud

Voting using the block chain- Restart Democracy

BBC London News on Bitcoin 2014

Buy Shares Current Share Price $1.00 = 100,000 satoshi

You wil need to trust this address with 100,000 Satoshi's for each share you want to order
Send Satoshi to the following address
1PmD8FEbQapTVsDomaLUVxh2pvxmrkoJDp

Thank you for your $1.00 = 100,000 satoshi membership payment

SCR For Meet Up Fund Co-Op

Lets Meetup and make it happen

Click to form your own meet up

Request info for the Meet Up Fund (MUF) or the MUF coin to be launched later in 2014

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Email
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Share offer in MUF Coop

Fund objective to give interest free bit loans to start up companies base on a stretched equity convertible loan.
A shares 100,000,000 shares authorised
Share block 1 Jan 2014
100,000 early bird A shares offered for 100,000 satoshi's per share this price is subject to supply and demand
Current price Jan 2014 is 100,000 Satoshi per share
block 1 investors wil be deemed the founder investors.
Shares will be issued once the first 100,000 shares are sold.
All transfers can be seen in the block chain and each shareholder will be identified by their public address
You can buy as many shares as you want however you will only ever get a single vote under co op rules.
You can sell your shares at any time by posting your shares for sale in the order book with the price you want for the shares.
Meet up Fund (MUF) Coin - There are 100,000,000 MUF Shares in the fund priced at 100,000 Satoshi's each ie fraction of bitcoin.
There are 100m satoshi's in one bit coin so
1 satoshi = circa $1000/100m = 0.001 cent.
$1 USD = 100,000 Satoshi
One vote is given to each member how ever many MUF shares they buy. The purpose of the fund is to support new start ups by seeding ventures with stretched micro equity convertible loans up to 25,000 with bullet payments due at the end of each year. MUF needs to raise $1000 to set itself up with a .coop domain and COOP legals. I have put a blog together for anyone interested and will seed it with some bitcoins.